No description available.

This thesis argues that Katherine Anne Porter's novel, Ship of Fools, "is not a departure from the body of Porter's work which precedes it, but a culmination in theme and technical achievement."

This investigation attempts to uncover a unity of both meaning and technique as reflected in eight of Katherine Anne Porter's best known and most characteristic stories-- "Old Mortality," "Noon Wine," "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," "Flowering Judas," "A Day's Work," "The Cracked Looking-Glass," "He," and "Holiday." An analysis of each story reveals that the core of Katherine Anne Porter's work is a "delicate balancing of rival considerations" specifically and deliberately designed to reveal to the reader the complexity and ambiguity of any situation or human relationship. The ambiguity within her stories is therefore deliberate. The final chapter, "The Open End and the Acceptance of Paradox," asserts that Katherine Anne Porter's technique is determined not by her classical conception of literary form, but by her philosophy of life.

Despite the devastating scope of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918, curiously few references to the flu exist in literature. Katherine Anne Porter offered one of modernism's only extensive fictional treatments of the pandemic in her short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” decades after her own near-death encounter with the flu. Porter was able to give voice to an experience that had traumatized others into silence by drawing on an early form of magical realism. Magical realism's ghosts—everyday presences rather than otherworldly beings to be feared—are of particular relevance to “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” since ghosts “haunt” Porter's semi-autobiographical Miranda throughout the story, acting as correctives to Miranda's (and Porter's) desire to isolate herself from the familial and regional heritage that burdens her with unwanted and often conflicting ideologies. Ultimately, in using magical realism to explore her sense of self and to articulate the alienating effects of her near-death experience, Porter is able to embrace her complicated heritage and her fractured past, reclaiming interconnectedness while maintaining her individuality.

No description available.

Katherine Anne Porter regards Mexico as her "familiar country." lndeed, Mexico in the art of this gifted American writer is more important than generally believed for, as William Nance says, "Mexico entered into her earliest work as both motivating force and subject matter." Miss Porter has traveled extensively in Mexico and lived there on several occasions. Her highly developed artistic sensibility has allowed her to gain more than a mere familiarity with the country, its inhabitants, and its history. Naturally, her deep knowledge of the culture is reflected in her artistic production, part of which is devoted exclusively to Mexico. This thesis presents a brief study of Miss Porter's fiction which deals with that country: it attempts to demonstrate a change in the author's perspective of it, evinced in those stories that have Mexico as a setting: namely, it shows how Miss Porter starts out deeply involved with the culture in the stories of ''Maria Concepcion", "The Martyr", and "Virgin Violeta", and how, slowly, the theme of alienation evolves in the stories "Flowering Judas',' "That Tree", and "Hacienda", interpreted as Miss Porter's disillusionment with the failure of the Mexican Revolution. This study intends to contribute to the field of Inter-American Studies in the sense that it deals directly with inter-cultural relations within the North American continent and with the understanding between cultures, seen through the eyes of a most accomplished writer. If there is a person who could be called truly inter-American, Miss Porter would be the perfect model, because she embodies the ideals of understanding between the different cultures of the North American continent.

No description available.

My thesis examines the discourse of Mexico in the works of three twentieth-century American authors-Cormac McCarthy, Jack Kerouac, and Katherine Anne Porter-in order to analyze representations of Otherness in modernism and postmodernism. I seek to destabilize the dividing line between these periods as well as to show how representation in postmodernity has become more problematic due in large part to the proliferation of consumer culture. Though the Mexico that McCarthy employs in Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) escapes many stereotypes, his Mexico is merely a staging ground that he uses to examine postmodern questions of philosophy while deconstructing myths such as the Old West and Manifest Destiny and reflecting on the ramifications of World War II. Therefore, McCarthy elides Mexico by using its Otherness as a mirror that enables reflection on the Self. Kerouac too is interested in using Mexico to solve U.S. problems. In On the Road, Kerouac's fictional counterpart, Sal Paradise, searches for the authenticity missing from middle-class American life by ultimately turning to the "authentic" Mexico. Though he is able to distinguish between simulations and reality in his own cultural context, once south of the border Sal misrecognizes what is a hypperreal Mexico for supreme authenticity. By contrast, when Katherine Anne Porter crosses the border, she is quick to identify corruption and revolutionary failure in Mexico. When pieces such as "Xochimilco" and "María Concepción" are placed alongside that of the work of Diego Rivera, a leader in the Mexican muralist movement, it becomes clear that Porter essentializes her Mexican subjects with the specific political goal in mind of furthering the revolution. Additionally, by crossing the generic lines separating fiction and non-fiction, Porter approximates what could be called a postmodern form of ethnography. Yet all of her representational strategies are tempered, especially in her last Mexican story, Hacienda, by an awareness that representations of Other cannot be other than flawed.

"The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty" examines certain prototypical natures of isolation as recurrent and underlying themes in selected short fiction of Chopin, Porter, and Welty. Despite the differing backgrounds of the three Southern women writers, and despite the variety of issues they treat, the theme of isolation permeates most of their short fiction. I categorize and analyze their short stories by the nature and the treatment of the varieties of isolation. The analysis and comparison of their short stories from this particular perspective enables readers to link the three writers and to acknowledge their artistic talent and grasp of human psychology and situations.